The field of this invention is the production of exhaust gases directly from the combustion chamber of internal combustion engines (especially diesel engines) for service as a nonflammable gas in the drilling and workover of oil and gas wells.
Nonflammable gases are used for a variety of applications in oil and gas wells including underbalanced drilling, geothermal drilling, lightening oil well fluids to initiate production, well cleaning, fracing and other well operations. These low cost nonflammable gases will have a variety of other applications in other markets such as purging lines, pigging pipelines, extinguishing fires, etc.
Historically, most of these operations have been done by an expensive cryogenic liquid nitrogen process. The proposed process have substantial economic and environmental advantages relative to the cryogenic nitrogen processes, however, the uses of internal combustion engine exhaust imposes certain requirements on the dehydration and cleaning of the gases.